


Imposter Syndrome

by LadySilver



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), The Tomorrow People (2013)
Genre: Arrow post season 3, Background Felicity Smoak/Oliver Queen, Case Fic, Crossover, Crossovers by LS, Gen, Masks, Original Character(s), Pre-Slash, Present Tense, TTP Post Season 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-04-17 15:26:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4671704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadySilver/pseuds/LadySilver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a person who looks just like her goes on a spree robbing jewelry stores, Thea comes comes under suspicion as the thief. To clear her name, she needs the help of someone who can see past the disguises that people wear. Fortunately, Cara Coburn is in town, searching for a new Tomorrow Person--one she has reason to believe is Thea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Imposter Syndrome

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Teaotter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teaotter/gifts).



> Teaotter-
> 
> You said you were open to any pairings, so I took you up on it. Also, I haven't seen Arrow season 3 since it was first run, and I had no way to do canon review, so I'm afraid there are canon errors in here. Consider anything I got wrong as AU...or let me know and I'll see if I can fix it. I hope you enjoy the story.

Even before she became a vigilante, Thea knew all about masks. Her mother taught her early that doubt and weaknesses are private matters. They are not to be shared with any but the closest confidants. With Oliver and Felicity gone for who-knows-where, and Roy off building his new life without her, she doesn't seem to have many of those left, so she puts on her masks and busies herself in her work.

She's settled behind the computer in her office looking through the payroll when Officer Lance comes in. She'd arrived early so she had plenty of time to check the inventory and give the books a going over, but at some point while she was immersed in the books, the club opened and now music thumps through the building and customers throng the floor. Her bartender alerts her to the cop's presence, so she closes the file and goes out to meet him. She's not old enough to sit at her own bar, but she still owns the building and runs the business, so she stands up straight, smooths the wrinkles out of her brown blazer, and puts on a professional smile.

Though alone, Lance is in uniform. He strides with purpose across the warehouse. The club patrons move out of the way for him, but otherwise don't seem perturbed at the cop's presence. Verdant has a reputation as a clean establishment, a place where the rules are enforced. At least, above ground, Thea adds to herself.

“Ms. Queen,” he greets her, when he draws close enough for her to hear him over the music. He touches the brim of his police cap and steps off to the side where the speakers aren't pointed directly at them.

“Officer Lance,” she returns. Her smile only chafes a little. “Is there something I can help you with?” He looks older every time she sees him; his hair is grayer, the lines on his face deeper. A part of her feels sorry for him.

“Wanna tell me where you were three hours ago?” Lance casts a glance toward the hallway that leads to the basement and the Arrow Cave. He knows what's down there and he figures that she's part of it; the accusation in his look is hard to miss. 

Thea's poise doesn't break. “I was here,” she answers. “I kind of have a club to run.” She spots one of the bouncers watching her, waiting for a sign that he needs to intervene. A small wave gets him to back down.

“Got anyone who can vouch for that?”

She has to take a breath to dilute the snideness that wants to flavor her response. “Why don't you check with my bartenders, if you don't believe me. What's this about?” 

“Someone matching...your...description has been implicated in a robbery,” he answers. His hesitation reinforces her suspicion that this visit is vigilante related. 

“I've been here since this afternoon.” She wants to rub her forehead, suddenly aware of how late the hour has grown and how long she's spent staring at a computer screen. Instead she parks a hand on her hip and challenges Lance to keep wasting her time. Her expression is pulled right from her mother's arsenal. 

Tipping his hat back, he looks for a second like he's going to press the point. All around them, colored lights strobe and a thin fog swirls through the air. This is Thea's domain. “All right,” Lance concedes. “It was a long shot anyway. Thank you for your time.” Turning on his heel, he leaves.

No sooner has he stepped through the exterior doors, than Thea escapes to her office. She barely makes it inside before her hands start to shake.

The office is tiny and the thin walls only dampen the beat of the music outside. Pressing her back against the door, she closes her eyes and calls on her training in stoicism. Eventually her hands stop shaking.

It's longer before she can make her way to the computer and get the web browser open. Lance wouldn't have come to her without reason, but he wouldn't have given up so quickly unless he had doubts. Strong doubts.

The news item she's looking for is buried halfway down the page: A jewelry store robbery. The details are scant; the police have to be withholding a lot more information than they've released. One of the suspects fits her general description, which wouldn't be worth the personal visit except that both the suspects wore hoods and masks—the kinds of hoods and masks that she and her brother wear in their vigilante modes, if the police sketch is anything to go by.

She texts Felicity for help, and only has to pace a dozen times around the office before it arrives. The security footage of the robbery. She doesn't want to know how Felicity got it so quickly.

And there, playing out on the computer screen in her office, is proof that Thea has learned how to be in two places at once.

In the emergency lighting of an otherwise closed store, she sees the two suspects moving around. The boy of the pair is dressed like a Halloween knock-off version of the Arrow, only he's much too short and slight for the costume to be effective. The girl, on the other hand, looks like Thea. Her hood is up and her mask is on, so Thea catches only the outline of her jaw and chin—and it looks like her own. She's even built the same. Thea leans closer to the screen, searching the image for any specific detail she could point to—a mole, a freckle, a scar, anything—that would prove that the person isn't her. The costume is an obvious fake, though one that probably would fool a person who hadn't spent the time wearing it that had. Otherwise, there's nothing.

Someone is out there pretending to be her—the vigilante version of her—and she has no idea who or how to stop her.

* * *

With the police out looking for her, Thea takes some time off from patrolling the streets. She devotes herself to Verdant—an occupation that seems to absorb any minute she has to give it—and to some private training so that she doesn't lose the skills she suffered for under Malcolm's tutelage. In that time, the mysterious pretender and her partner make two more strikes on the jewelry stores of Starling City.

It's the last one that changes the game.

It takes Felicity a couple days to come through with the security video. “They were still using analog,” she exclaims from whichever flyover state she and Oliver are driving through now. Her image is on one of the other screens at the workstation; it's shaking, so Thea guesses that she's on her phone in the car. She hopes Oliver is the one driving. “VCRs. Do you even know what a VCR is? I barely know what a VCR is. This technology museum in Nebraska had one; it was how they played the welcome video.” She frowns and tugs on her pony tail. Her face is sunburned. “I'm pretty sure they were using it unironically. Anyway, I had to wait for someone to digitize the tape and upload somewhere I could access it.”

Thea lowers herself into the seat in front of the computers and starts clicking through the different prompts she has to follow to get to the file. “Are you sure it's—never mind. I found it.” 

“Are you sure you don't need us to come back?” Felicity asks.

For an alarming moment, Thea actually debates taking Felicity up on her offer. She knows that Oliver needs this break, and that he and Felicity deserve to be alone together, but the part of her that's never stopped being a little girl wants her big brother to come home and solve all her problems. “I'm fine. It's under control,” she lies. “Besides, there's nothing any of us can do until one or both of these guys make a mistake.”

The footage, in all its grainy and poorly-lit glory, starts running. It's scratchy because of its analog origin, but clear enough that she identifies the thieves as the ones she's been following. Their costumes still look ridiculous. 

They have a pattern. About an hour after the store closes, they emerge from the staff restroom—no one's figured out yet how they get into the restroom without setting off the alarms, and every store owner has become hyper-vigilant about checking their restrooms, without any effect—and then proceed to pick through the display cabinets. Once finished, they return to the restroom, and somehow make their escape.

Thea watches the script play out. The thieves don't rush. They've become a lot more confident, and a lot more selective, over their last few heists. It takes them about ten minutes to work their way through the store. It's when they head back to the restroom that the game changes. This store's restroom, it turns out, is locked from the outside. 

The boy of the pair grabs the knob and rattles it like he can shake the lock loose. They don't seem particularly perturbed. The girl is urging the boy to get the door open and he's saying something to her that the video-only camera doesn't capture when all the lights spring on. Both their heads pop up, fear written across their faces. Something's triggered the alarms. The boy grabs the knob with both hands and heaves, throwing his weight behind the effort. The door remains stubbornly shut. The girl urges him to hurry up, hurry up. Thea sees her lips moving with the exhortation. Then she stops, and says something else to the boy that Thea can't lipread.

His efforts cease; he nods once. The girl throws her arms around him, and the video image glitches and blinks out. When it returns, they're gone.

Thea stares at the video, stunned. She knows the tricks that Oliver and the others have used to distract so they can escape from police and villains and this—this doesn't look like one of them. There's no smoke residue, no casing or marks on the floor from a flashbang or a smoke grenade. “Felicity,” she says. “They're gone. They just vanished.”

“What do you mean 'they just vanished'?” Felicity responds. She must not have watched the video herself. “Like, they walked out the door and went around the corner, or they hacked the cameras and put on a loop of the empty store, or--” She holds up her two fists and pops them open with a mouth explosion. She gets her answer from Thea's glare back. “That's not—I mean, people can't—powers?” She clamps her mouth shut and makes a face like she'd known this topic was coming and had hoped to avoid it. Her voice squeaks when she speaks again. “We must be dealing with metahumans. I-I need to do some research. I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Can you hang tight until then?”

Hanging tight is the last thing Thea wants to do, but she agrees. The call ends. Thea paces once around the Cave, debating whether to go back upstairs to the club and try to bury herself in the inventory list or whether to go see this jewelry store her herself, see if she can pick up a clue that the police might not know is important.

She finds herself donning her gear before she's even consciously made a decision.

Rather than heading downtown, she goes to the Glades. At least there she can make a difference.

She's getting herself immersed in busting a major drug exchange, crawling along the catwalks in an abandoned factory while she gets a lay of how many people there are to deal with and what their weapons are, when her foot hits a slick spot and she slips. She hits the catwalk hard and the clang of her body against metal rings out. Immediately, all the guns down below are pointed at her.

There's no way out of this. The nearest cover is scores of feet in either direction and she's armed with only a pair of escrima sticks and a bow, neither of which are effective weapons against all the semi-automatic and automatic weapons pointed at her. She holds her hands up, hoping for mercy, and hears the weapons cock.

Just as she's about to make a break for it, taking her chances and hoping that the gunmen have terrible aim, she's tackled. She hits the catwalk hard again. Dimly, she hears the first staccato burst of a gun shooting, and then she's outside. The air reeks from the fumes of the nearby paper mill and the light polluted sky is open above her. It's so different in distance and texture from the aluminum ceiling she'd been looking at that she spends nearly a half minute staring at it before she figures out what she's seeing.

“You're Thea, right?” a voice says. “I hope you're Thea.”

Still acting on instinct, Thea rolls away from the person who was holding her and into a crouch, reaching for the sticks in preparation for an attack. “Who are you?”

The other woman rises to her feet and sweeps her long dark hair over her shoulder. She's wearing loose black slacks and a sleek gray shirt with a matching short jacket. A red vinyl mask—less like the kind someone would buy in the Halloween store, and more like one might buy in an Adult store—covers her eyes. “I'm—Well, I guess you could call me—Oh, hell. I'm Cara. I suck at this alter-ego thing. Are you OK? Did you get hit?”

Thea pulls the sticks into defensive position, one angled high, one angled low, and takes a step back. From inside the warehouse, she hears gunfire rattling out and she knows that this woman saved her from a very painful death, but that doesn't mean she has to trust her. “I'm fine. You were following me. Why?” Only after the words have left her mouth does it occur to her that she should have denied her name. In this guise, she's Speedy. She needs to get better at being that name.

“The jewelry store robberies.” Cara casts a glance around, verifying that the bad guys haven't followed them outside, then continues, “I thought you might be like us after I heard about the first once. When the jewelry started turning up hundreds of miles away from Starling City, I decided to come out here and see for myself. Can I just ask what you're going after here? Robbing jewelry stores on one side and then going after drug dealers on the other? I assume you weren't trying to steal the drugs for yourself?”

“I'm not a criminal,” Thea protests, knowing that most of the Starling City police force would disagree with her on that. “I'm here to stop the criminals, but I can't take them on by myself now.” Maybe she should have called in Laurel or Diggle to help her. Was it too late to call them in now? How did Oliver manage to work alone in the beginning without screwing any bust up as badly as she screwed this one up. “Besides, I'm not the one robbing the stores. That's someone else.”

Cara tilts her head. “I don't understand. Tim said...” She trails off. “Look, I know this is all a lot to deal with. We've all been through it...and I really should be handling this better.” She rubs her hands on her pants and heaves out a breath.

Thea's not interested in whatever Cara is talking about. She starts to edge back toward the shadows of the nearest building, the sticks still out.

Abruptly, Cara pushes off like she's going to leap forward and tackle Thea again, then vanishes. A thump from behind her has Thea whirling around to come face-to-face with Cara again. “Just give me one minute. I can explain.” 

Thea manages to abort her attack, her grip tightening on the sticks instead of powering them through the woman's head. “You're a metahuman.” Somehow, Thea manages to keep her face composed, though her thoughts are whirling. The rescue had made that much clear, but what she just saw Cara do is exactly the same as what the girl in the video did. She doesn't think metahumans' powers work that way; what little anyone has explained to her so far about the S.T.A.R. Labs disaster made it sound like each metahuman has powers that are a unique response to the circumstances they were in at the time of the explosion.

“Paranormal,” Cara corrects. She'd started to brush the grime off her pants and stops abruptly. “That doesn't surprise you?”

Suspicious, Thea takes a closer look at Cara. The mask across her eyes makes it easier to compare the person in front of her to the one in the video, and there's no mistaking the one for the other. Cara is several inches taller than she is, her chin far less pointed, and body shape broader on top. Unless the mask, or her metahuman powers, includes the ability to shapeshift, Cara is not the imposter.

“Nothing surprises me anymore,” Thea answers, and it might be the wrong decision, but she decides to re-sheath the escrima. The sticks slot back into their holders with barely a whisper that she hears only because the warehouse she was in has become silent. The people inside have apparently figured out that their target escaped. She knows that once they've regrouped, they'll head outside to check the perimeter. “We can't stay here. My motorcycle is around the corner. We need to get out of here before someone finds us.” She starts walking, a sharp jerk of her head inviting Cara to follow her. 

As important as stealth and speed are, the going is slow because the ground is uneven. Most of the safety lights that had been added over the year are busted, and the few that remain produce only a sickly, yellow glow.

Cara moves even slower, her body swiveling as she scans her surroundings. “You know that, wherever we're going, there are safer...and faster...ways to get there.”

“You mean your vanishing act?” Thea asks. She thinks about how the girl disappeared from the jewelry store and how Cara saved her from being shot. Being able to move like that had no end of useful purposes. It was fast like The Flash, but without the need to worry about walls and locks and other barriers that wouldn't be fun to meet at high speed. 

“I can teach you, if you want.”

Thea stumbles, that offer not one she'd ever imagined being made to her. “Teach me? Teach me what? I don't have any powers.” She's pretty sure someone would have pointed out them out to her by now, if she did. With the training that Malcolm put her through, she had plenty of opportunity to learn how to vanish.

“You don't?” Narrowing her eyes, Cara stares with a gaze that bores through her. She touches a finger to her temple when she's done like what she found hurt her. “You really don't. But—”

“Not unless you're counting my wicked ability to get myself in over my head,” Thea adds. She's not such what just happened there, but she figures that this is not the best time to find out. Pulling the bike away from the wall, she starts walking it out of the alley. 

“Based on what you're wearing, I'd guess you also have a wicked ability to get yourself out of those problems. Those weapons look pretty serious, and you look like you know how to use them.”

“I do,” Thea confirms. There's no use pretending that the weapons are props. In studying with Malcolm and observing Oliver after she learned the truth about him, she noticed that the way a person holds their body, the way they move, changes from studying how to fight. Cara's gait has that affect, too. 

Under one of the lights, Cara casts another look around the industrial region they're in. Her mouth puckers in disgust at what she sees. This part of town didn't suffer too badly from the Undertaking, mostly because it was already too dilapidated to damage further. The buildings here were constructed in the forties as part of the war effort, and abandoned in the eighties as a consequence of the economic downturn. They are crumbling brick, broken glass, rusted metal, and crime magnets. “You really come out here at night without any powers?”

Thea takes a long step over a puddle that glimmers with an oily sheen. “Someone has to.” Everything down here is a rude awakening from the manicured and sculpted world she grew up in. She doubts she'll ever get used to the Glades.

“By yourself?” Cara skirts the same puddle.

“The other people I know who'd be doing this are all occupied right now,” Thea says flatly.

Cara nods like she gets it. “That's why I keep looking for other paranormals. Someone's gotta bring them in before they get themselves in trouble. I can't believe I got this search so wrong. The other Tomorrow People are never going to let me live this down. Don't ask,” she says before Thea can question her on the name.

“OK, how about you tell me about your powers,” Thea reminds her. That's not what Cara meant when she asked for a minute, but it's how Thea's going to interpret it. If she's going to have any chance of catching her imposter, she needs to know what she's dealing with. “Tell me about paranormals.” 

“Not here. I'd prefer to be someplace were we won't get mugged. Or murdered.” 

They're far enough away from the factory now to risk starting the engine, so Thea swings onto the seat and sticks the lone helmet over her head. Cara's going to have to do without. Cara gets on the motorcycle behind Thea. She hesitates, then grips Thea's waist. Her hands are warm through the leather, and their heat spreads through Thea's body, filling an emptiness that Thea had mistaken for fortitude.

They're still a block away from Verdant when Thea spots the cherries and berries in the club parking lot. Her stomach sinks at the sight. Police at Verdant could be anything: a bar fight, an underage bust, a hold up. But she knows it's not. She know that those lights are for her. There's been another robbery, and this time she's been caught without a valid alibi.

Without slowing down, she cruises past the club and gets on the street that leads to her apartment. Bringing Cara into her home is only slightly less abhorrent than bringing her into the Arrow Cave, only she feels like she's running out of choices.

The situation is the same at her apartment: A police car out front with its lights spinning. Any small doubt she had before about the car at the club vanishes at the sight of the second vehicle.

“Pull over here,” Cara yells over the rushing air and rumbling engine. 

Thea almost misses the command except that she was thinking the same thing. She pulls the bike into an alley between two buildings and parks in the darkest shadow she can find. They're hardly stopped when Cara disappears. The bike lurches under the sudden loss of weight.

From her angle, Thea can't see much of her building except the corner window of her apartment. The light is on inside; she knows she turned it off before she left. A silhouette appears behind the curtains, pauses to look out the windows, then resumes pacing. She wonders how Lance got a warrant so quickly, or if he even bothered with one.

A second later, Cara reappears. “You were right; there was another one.” She swings her leg back over the seat of the bike and settles in, her hands finding Thea's waist as if they were meant to be there.

“You can read minds, too?” Thea asks, annoyed that she hadn't caught on before now. That had to be how Cara knew her name. She bites her lip at the thought of what else Cara might have found out, then forces the worry down and away. Any secrets she had to keep have been blown. Besides, it's not like Oliver hadn't told half the people in Starling City about himself already.

“Yes. Good thing, too. The cop waiting outside was thinking very clearly about where the robbery was.”

“How will that help?”

“I don't know this city. If you can get me to the jewelry store, I think I can find the thieves.”

For the first time, Thea feels some of the hopelessness lift off her shoulders. If Cara's right, she just might be able to solve this mystery without getting herself thrown in jail. And she's going to have a hell of a story to tell Oliver.

* * *

The store is a tiny, the lone holdout in a strip mall that been slowly dying for years. Like the others, the scene is roped off while the police investigate, but there's no sign of a smashed door or broken windows. Nor is there any sign of the police.

This time Thea parks out front. Either she's going to condemn herself completely, or she's going to clear her own name and it won't matter if a witness reports seeing her at the scene.

Weeks of wondering who the thieves are and how they are so successfully pulling off their heists and evading capture ends before Cara has finished walking to the front door.

“Got it,” she says, turning back toward Thea with a satisfied grin. “Her teleport signatures are all over. She must have scouted this place for days.” She unhooks some handcuffs from her belt loop and tosses them once in the air. “Ready?”

“For what?” Thea eyes the handcuffs, suddenly suspicious of Cara's plans for them. She can't be an undercover cop because that would make this whole evening the strangest form of entrapment that Thea's ever heard of.

Cara grabs her shoulder, an electric surge runs over her body, and the world blinks out.

They arrive in the middle of a small living room. A wrap around couch takes up most of the space and a large flat screen television blares from its enshrined spot on the wall. The beige carpet hasn't been vacuumed in so long that dust puffs up under Thea's feet.

The teen thieves are sitting on the couch with their latest loot spread out on the leather seat between them. They're still in costume, though they've ditched the masks. They don't even have time to look up at the intrusion before Cara slaps the handcuffs around the girl's wrist. A blue light comes to life on the cuffs.

The girl's gaze flickers from the cuffs, to Cara, to her brother, to Thea, and her mouth tightens in anger.

“What?” The brother stands up and Cara pushes him back down with a wave of her hand. “Em, get us out of here!”

“Too late,” Thea says, and then she stops because she's not sure what to say next. 'You've failed this city' is too harsh for a couple of juvenile delinquents. With their masks on, Thea hadn't noticed how young the two thieves are. They can't be more than sixteen. They're petty thieves, not even a caliber of criminal she'd normally bother with had it not been for them involving her.

The boy is slight with a mop of sandy brown hair that perches awkwardly on his head. Freckles cover his face and arms. Without the hood concealing him, no one could possibly mistake him for Oliver. Considering that Lance had never asked her about Oliver's whereabouts, she guesses that no one had considered his involvement at all.

The girl, Em, is Thea's spitting image except her eyes are rounder and dark. With the mask on, that difference isn't noticeable.

“I can't,” Em wails. 

Cara jerks Em to her feet and begins sweeping the jewelry back into the bag they'd transported it in. “Suppressor cuffs. None of your powers will work until I take them off.”

“All of them?” Thea asks as her attention lands on the far wall. A series of portraits are hung along it, mostly framed school photos. The boy's photos show braces and acne and a long history of hair that refuses to do anything other than clump, but they're all clearly him. The girl's photos also show braces and acne, but this girl looks nothing like the one sitting before Thea. The pictured girl is blonde with wide features. The only similarity is the eyes.

Cara sees where Thea is looking and picks up the connections Thea is making in her head. She stops her clean up and does a pat down. She pulls an iPod Nano from the girl's pocket, inspects it, then presses the power button. Instantly, the girl's image slips from the clone of Thea back to the one in the pictures, with curly hair that drapes to her shoulders. “Where did you get this?” Cara asks, pushing Em back against the couch.

Indignant, Em answers, “I made it.” She struggles, but Cara's arm across her chest is too strong.

“She did!” the boy adds. No brother has ever sounded so proud of his sister. “She can look like anyone. It's so cool!”

Cara closes her eyes a moment, composing herself. “You invented something that lets you look like anyone and you're robbing jewelry stores?”

“I needed money to market it,” Em responds.

“You and John need to have a long talk,” Cara responds.

Thea's too stunned at the shortsightedness to say anything. Queen Consolidated and Palmer Industries would have fought over such a device if they'd known about it. These kids could be living in a mansion with maids instead of this dirty house. “Let's get them out of here,” she finally manages. There's still the matter of her own alleged involvement in the crimes.

A quick search of the house turns up more poorly-tended rooms and the rest of the jewelry. Emily's room is the neatest place in the house, with all of her electronic and computer gear labeled and filed. Tyler's room is plastered in superhero pictures and filled with action figures. It's easy to see why he was so eager to go along with his sister's plan.

They're walking the kids up the steps to the police station—Emily back in her technology-generated guise—when Thea stops them. She hasn't had enough time to process everything, but one point's been bothering her enough that she can't let it go: “Why me?” If Emily could take on any appearance, why not invent her own vigilante. Or, hell, why didn't she play the part of the Arrow and have her brother dress like someone else? “Why were you pretending to be me?”

Emily pushes her hood down and rolls her eyes. “Duh.” She refuses to say more after that.

“What do you think she meant by that?” Thea asks Cara later. They've left the jewels, the thieves, with a note about the device and its capabilities, at the station for the police to sort out. Now there's one last loose end.

They're standing in the alley down the street from Thea's apartment. The police car is still spinning its lights in the parking lot and Lance's silhouette is still pacing past the window at regular intervals.

Cara looks at Thea with an arched eyebrow. “You have to ask? You're a superhero.”

“So are you!”

Cara pulls the mask out of her pocket and turns it over in her hands. “I have powers. That's not the same thing. Personally, I don't think 'superhero' is a good look for me. I'm going to leave that to the Scarlet Avengers and your crew out here. And I think I'm going to leave bringing the new Tomorrow People in to _any_ of the others.”

Thea still doesn't understand exactly what Cara is; she's not one of the S.T.A.R. Labs' metahumans. She briefly wonders what Felicity will have found out in her research, and how accurate it'll be. That thought it quashed as Lance's shadow flits past her window again. His obsession in going after Oliver is what led to Roy needing to fake his death and leave town. She doesn't want to have to end up in the same position.

She pulls off the distinctive red outfit that she wears in the field and folds it into the duffel bag she keeps on the bike. The leggings and shirt she has on underneath are exercise apparel, not meant to be seen outside the gym, but it's all she has until she can get back into either Verdant or her apartment. “Do you think he'll believe me if I tell him I've been working out?”

“This time of night?”

Thea shrugs. “I do keep night club hours.”

Cara drops her mask into the top of the duffel bag. “He'll want to know what gym you go to, and then he'll check with the trainers there. I have a better idea.” She raises her eyebrow at Thea. “You'll want to take that off, first.”

The mask. She'd packed away the hood, weapons, and the rest of the outfit and had still forgotten her mask.

“I already know your name,” Cara points out. “And...pretty much everything else you were thinking tonight.”

It's a big step. Everyone who knows her with her mask on knew her as Thea Queen first. Most of them were her family, or close enough to it. She's never gone the other way. A breath in, slower out. The alley smells of exhaust and dryer vent.

She takes off the mask and ruffles a hand over her hair, fluffing out the mark the band leaves on her head. “OK.”

Cara leads her out of the alley and onto the sidewalk. Most of the apartment windows along the street still glow and a couple of faint conversations drift from open windows. The police car in front of her building is still running its lights. “So, dinner and a movie?”

Lance knows she wasn't at the club nor was she at the apartment. She's spent so much time at one of those two places recently, or in between them, that neither of them thought about the whole rest of the city out there. It's a good plan, telling him they were on date, except: “I wouldn't go out dressed like this!” Thea casts a scornful look at her outfit. At least she's not sweaty or bloody. That would be a lot harder to explain away.

“I meant tomorrow,” Cara says. “Tonight, I think we'll just tell your cop whatever he wants to hear. People have a way of filling in the rest on their own.” Her smile is gentle, but Thea's already had a glimpse of the steel that lives underneath. 

It might just be strong enough to withstand the real her.


End file.
